Race To The Top Cartography

There’s no shortage of idioms and expressions about the need to know where you are going. Lewis Carroll said something like, “If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there” – a remark echoed in “Any Road” on George Harrison’s last [posthumous] record. Except for the most carefree among us, most of us are working diligently, if not frantically, to get to a better educational place.

We all have a lot on our plate: Standards, Data, Practice, and Culture all have to change and have to change at the same time [now]. For Standards, this means the Common Core, and soon enough, Next Generation Science. For Data, this means common formative and interim assessments. For Standards, this means APPRs for teachers and principals. For Culture, this means we simply have to change the way we do business – that actual, honest-to-goodness “co-laboring on the right work” has to become our fundamental operating system. Each of these four areas is a heavy lift in their own right. To try to do all four simultaneously is a monumental task that will require Herculean efforts on the part of each and every educator. The four are so interdependent, however, that to look at them in isolation could lead us off in different directions. So, we must make sure that they are interconnected and that they do all point in the same direction: students ready for their future in the 21st Century (College, Career, and Citizenship readiness).

To get “there” from “here” is quite a journey. Until the app is developed or address ready to be entered into the GPS, we’ve developed a good, old-fashioned road map to lead us to that destination. Our RTTT Road Map can be used to point you to your destination and it can be used to locate yourself in order to know where you stand in relation to your destination. We’ve already found it useful while working with districts to help them plot their course and, when necessary, to double-back a little ways in order to make sure that they are ready to move ahead.

Our Race To The Top Road Map, while certainly not perfect and certainly not appropriate for all contexts, might help you on your journey. Unfold it, locate yourself, and take off. Good luck!

ISLLC Win-Win... Win!

So, you're trying to help principals, or principal evaluators, or principal-candidates understand the ISLLC Standards:

1. Setting a widely shared vision for learning
2. Developing a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff professional growth
3. Ensuring effective management of the organization, operation, and resources for a safe, efficient, and effective learning environment
4. Collaborating with faculty and community members, responding to diverse community interests and needs, and mobilizing community resources
5. Acting with integrity, fairness, and in an ethical manner
6. Understanding, responding to, and influencing the political, social, legal, and cultural contexts.

Maybe you do an overview of the six standards and then ask your audience to try to makes sense of them graphically. Sooner or later the conversation shifts to using the ISLLC Standards for evaluation -- and how to collect evidence of the Standards. A natural activity would be to have the participants generate lists of the artifacts and other sources of evidence for each of the Standards. That's a logical approach and not unlike one I've employed in the past. What do you get when you do this? You get a cacophony of potential artifacts -- and everyone reaches for a 4" three-ring binder in which to collect all this stuff and which will eventually accompany the other three-ring binders in the vinyl library.

We can do better! We can use the ISLLC Standards for school improvement and not just evaluation. A colleague, Dawn Shannon from Broome-Tioga BOCES, showed me how to use the ISLLC Standards in a way that can guide school improvement initiatives and provide a scheme for growth-producing feedback and evaluation.

Here's how: Rather than collecting all sorts of evidence about all sorts of efforts, the principal and superintendent (or supervisor) should identify an initiative for the school year (yes, this overlaps with the goal) and use the ISLLC Standards to guide, follow, and evaluate the success of the initiative/goal. The evidence that is collected, therefore, is centered (and authentic) on the initiative. The initiative will benefit from the analysis and application of the ISLLC Standards and the evidence will be collected for proposes of evaluation. This is a win-win situation! We can comply with the APPR regulations while also helping principals with their authentic initiatives and goals.

This is a much better alternative to just collecting binders full of evidence that is disconnected -- the shotgun approach to evidence collection. Instead, follow an initiative (and improve the initiative) while collecting evidence. Along the way, monitor the progress of the initiative with the ISLLC framework. It can be a trifecta: growth-producing feedback for the principal, evaluation for the regulations, and initiative improvement for the school. Win-win-win!